Saturday, July 19, 2008

Show & Tell: Fluffernutter

She's fluffy and she's nuttier than a fruit cake, hence the name "Fluffernutter". She's a seal point Himalayan cat. That's her younger, half brother in the lower part of the picture, the late, great, Mister B.

Hey, what are two doing in that closet?!

She outlived him by three years, so far. She'll be nineteen on Monday.

When I first met Fluffernutter, Magic's cat, she was one of those neurotic, pure bred cats who would meow, asking to be petted, and then run away as soon as you reached out to stroke her.

Watch Fluffernutter Run. Run Fluff, run!

Magic used to leave dried food out for his cats 24/7. I told him that this wasn't good for them, but he didn't want to "deny" them. Mister B ate so much that the bed would shake when he jumped up on it, that is, when he could get his fat ass up there. Mister B got diabetes with the constant supply of crappy food.

Eventually, I convinced Magic to put both Mister B and Fluffernutter on a raw food diet to help with Mister B's newly diagnosed diabetes. We got Mr. B's diabetes under control, with the improved diet and daily insulin shots, and he lived for another 4 1/2 years. Flutternutter, in the meanwhile, had a personality change. She sounded like a Hoover vacuum when she sucked down new food. She soon became a friendly cat who no longer hid under the bed when you approached her.

Now that she is older, she doesn't like the raw food diet anymore. I finally stopped fighting with her, and now just give her high quality canned food. Fluffernutter has her own geriatric medical problems. We have to give her subcutaneous fluids every other day to offset her failing kidneys. You thought subcutaneous shots were bad? Try having a 22 gauge needle under your skin for 15 minutes while you have 100cc of fluid injected in. We have an IV bag set up in the living room for her. Without it, Fluffernutter would have been dead a long time ago.

While Fluff looks ferocious in this picture, she is actually demonstrating how she drives us crazy in the dead of night, yowling at nothing in particular. We were told that this was a symptom of hyperthyroidism, a common problem in senior cats. We treated her thyroid, which helped for a bit, but she continues to wake us from a sound sleep with her yowling.

This is how Fluffernutter spends most of her time during the day when she doesn't yowl: